The Last Place Lance Can Race

Ever-Competitive Armstrong Turns to Strava, a Social Network for Endurance Racers

ENLARGE

Lance Armstrong
Associated Press

By

Kevin Helliker

Updated Feb. 5, 2013 12:01 a.m. ET

During his televised interview last month with Oprah Winfrey,Lance Armstrong expressed contrition for doping during his cycling career and for bullying those who tried to expose him.

The ever-competitive Lance Armstrong is turning to Strava, a social network for endurance racers. WSJ's Kevin Helliker joins Lunch Break with a look at the last place Lance can race. Photo: Getty Images.

But on Strava, a social network that lets athletes of all levels challenge each other, Armstrong appears unbowed. Armstrong's Strava page bears in the profile-photograph space the image of a cannon above the words, "Come and Take It." His one-line Strava biography: "According to my rivals, peers, and teammates I won the Tour de France 7 times." Since his Oprah appearance, Armstrong has continued updating the page. He couldn't be reached for comment for this story.

That unapologetic posture may be classic Armstrong, who described himself to Winfrey as a cyclist who at times wouldn't let rules, common courtesy or physical pain get in the way of winning.

But it also reflects the free-spirited ethos of Strava, a website devoted to competing outside organized-race lines. Users of Strava compete without bibs, registration fees, starting guns, doping protocols, referees, podiums or course maps. Like kids fashioning games out of neighborhood landmarks—Who can run fastest from the Big Tree to Gregory's garage?—Strava users can turn any stretch of road or path into a racetrack by employing the company's GPS-powered app to time their performance, then uploading it onto the website.

Once a course is created, Strava ranks riders on it. The fastest rider on each course is dubbed KOM, for King of the Mountain, a term borrowed from the Tour de France. For female users the term is QOM, though women represent only 10% of cyclists using Strava. After Armstrong won seven KOMs on a single day last summer, the comments on his Strava page included, "What a beast," "Angry KOM's today," and "Badass, Lance."

In only three years, Strava has gained more than 1 million users. In a fast-growing universe of fitness apps that serve as exercise logs, Strava facilitates free-of-charge competition between users who typically don't know each other and may traverse on courses years apart from each other. Based in San Francisco, closely held Strava is also used by runners, who can win a CR—course record—for posting the fastest time on a particular segment. (About half of Strava runners are women.) The site charges a fee for premium services such as analysis of heart-rate data.

The winning of a KOM isn't scientific. Although Strava says it weeds out belief-defying performance claims, a KOM conceivably could be achieved on a motorcycle, not to mention with performance-enhancing drugs.

Even so, the battle for KOMs is cutthroat. When a KOM-holder is dethroned, Strava sends him an email that begins, "Uh oh," then details who set the new record and by how much. In three years on the website, Mark Feary says he has received any number of "Uh oh" emails, usually telling him that the KOM he'd recently obtained had been reclaimed by its previous holder. Although Feary uses Strava primarily to train for cyclocross races, he says "a lot of guys don't compete anywhere except on Strava, and they take KOMs seriously." Feary, a Chicago-area sales manager, held eight KOMs as of Monday evening.

Many athletes use Strava to rank their own performances over time, measuring not only speed and distance but also heart rate, power output and other information. An Armstrong posting on Jan. 22 won him an essentially meaningless CR because Strava had only ever recorded one other runner on that course. But Armstrong's posting provided other useful information: He ran 7.2 miles at an average pace of 6:33 per mile while climbing 563 feet and burning 1,164 calories.

Not all Strava badges are equal. One of the most desired is attached to Harlem Hill, a notoriously steep incline in New York's Central Park. About 3,350 Strava users have raced Harlem Hill a combined total of about 90,000 times, making a minor celebrity of Chad Butts, a local cycling coach who has held the Harlem Hill KOM since June 2011. "I hear about it a lot—more than I thought it would," says Butts, 33. If someone dethroned him, he adds, "I would go back to reclaim it."

Turning public roads and paths into race tracks isn't without risk. In 2010, a cyclist descending a steep hill far faster than the posted speed limit outside Berkeley, Calif., died in a collision with a car. The family of the cyclist, William Kim Flint II, has sued Strava in superior court in San Francisco, alleging that the cyclist died while seeking to reclaim a KOM. "There's something inherently wrong with setting up a race that you can only win by breaking the speed limit," says Susan Kang, attorney for the Flint family, adding that even after Flint's death Strava users continued setting KOMs on that course, a feat that requires defying the posted speed limit amid often heavy automotive traffic.

ENLARGE

The Strava profile page for Armstrong.
Strava.com

A Strava statement on the litigation, which is pending, said, "The death of Kim Flint was a tragic accident, and we expressed our sincere condolences when it occurred in 2010. Based on the facts involved in the accident and the law, there is no merit to this lawsuit. We will defend the company vigorously through the legal process ahead."

Even so, Strava added a feature allowing users to tag a particular course as hazardous, a move that triggers the website to stop ranking riders on that segment, as happened to the course on which Flint died.

Despite holding an especially coveted KOM—for the 6.1-mile loop around Central Park in 12 minutes, 36 second—Brooklyn native Erin Korff worries that Strava might be contributing to an escalating competition among two-wheeled commuters all across New York. "Every ride across the Brooklyn Bridge now becomes a race between people," said Korff. The Brooklyn Bridge KOM is held by a Strava user who crossed the 1.2-mile segment in 3:07, at 23.9 miles per hour.

On its site, Strava encourages users to follow traffic rules. A spokesman said, "We continue to encourage good behavior within our community and strive for users to understand their responsibilities—that they have to follow the law and use common sense. You are in charge of your own safety and the safety of those around you when you are riding or running."

ENLARGE

A photo of cyclist Chad Butts, who owns the Strava status of King of the Mountain for New York's popular Harlem Hill.
Matt Vandivort/Photo Rhetoric

In cycling circles, many riders have rallied to the defense of Strava. "It's a very big stretch to attempt to say Strava is liable for the risks some of its members may take," Bob Mionske, the Road Rights blogger for Bicycling.com, wrote last summer.

What some see as Strava's Wild West culture may explain why it remains hospitable to its most famous and controversial user. With dozens of KOMs and CRs, Armstrong has been a user of Strava since at least August 2011, though until recently his Strava page was listed under his well-known alias, Juan Pelota, the name of a coffee shop he owns in Austin, Texas.

Before the airing of his Jan. 17 Oprah Winfrey interview, Armstrong switched his Strava page to his own name, mounted the come-and-take-it illustration and added the biographical line about his rivals, peers and teammates saying he had won the Tour de France seven times.

Although that gesture drew a few negative comments on Armstrong's Strava page, the defrocked Tour de France winner received mostly kudos from among his 10,000 Strava followers. That support appeared only to deepen following the interview, when Armstrong posted several Strava course records during training runs in Hawaii. "Lance, you have inspired me for [so] long," wrote one Strava follower of his. "To be able to follow you on Strava will continue to inspire."

This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. Distribution and use of this material are governed by our Subscriber Agreement and by copyright law. For non-personal use or to order multiple copies, please contact Dow Jones Reprints at 1-800-843-0008 or visit www.djreprints.com.